P. D. James Men Quotations

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.

A regime which combines perpetual surveillance with total indulgence is hardly conducive to healthy development.

Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.

I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.

It is always easy to question the judgement of others in matters of which we may be imperfectly informed.

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?

No government can act in advance of the moral will of the people.

Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.

We can experience nothing but the present moment, live in no other second of time, and to understand this is as close as we can get to eternal life.